Week 4 has been some great progress on the film production for look and feel, as well as finalizing a logo for our studio! This week has been focused on getting all the props and characters uv unwrapped and textured. I also needed to figure out what we were going to render with and the type of shaders to use. I was in a toss up of between Renderman or Redshift.

Other things on our task list was searching for a rigging artist to rig our broom model so we can start animating. Definitely crazy times ahead of us as our deadline approaches. We're still trying to figure out a good pipeline to keep everything organized.

We have some exciting News! We've been thinking about our second project starting in May and Xing Guo will be directing it! The project is called Egg Toast, but it's actually a short 15 sec video based on hot pot ingredients and set to the music in this video. Everyone will animate however they want; 2D, 3D, Stop-motion, ect. We're all very excited and ready to also eat tons of hot pot during the production.

Logo

Theo was able to finish the final look of our logo and did amazing 2D animation work. It was very relaxing watching him animate on the Broom Cupboard Twitch page.Overall, this logo took a lot of effort! We narrowed down many logo designs that you can see from last blog post, and special thanks to Nelson, Xing and Theo, we came up with this.

Look Development

Here's a look development test I did over the week. I UV unwrapped the broom and made a simple texture for it. The bristles were a pain, so I decided to add in a shader that would make a vertical gradient and darken the bristles around the bottom of the broom. This shader is called KoddeCreateRampMap.Here's a video of it:

For the toon shading, I used a surface shader with a ramp node plugged in. The ramp node has 4 texture-6 nodes of one texture map of different light values. The ramp node is also connected to a clamp set from min-0 and max-1. The clamp node is connected to a surface-luminance node. Basically the surface illuminance node will break down the surface of a mesh into numerical values between 0-1 depending on how light hits it. A texture from the ramp will appear on the mesh, depending on the value of light hitting the surface on the mesh. So if you had a bright highlight on the mesh from the light that was a value of .1, then a texture on the ramp close to .1 will appear. This pipeline came from a production I worked on for the University of Washington. Down below shows the original setup. I just removed the noise.

Here's an example of the textures I made for the broom.

Lastly I connected the koddcreaterampmap shader to the texture ramp shader through color composite set to multiply. Then the out color was my shader I applied to the broom.

Everything was rendered in Arnold...that can render surface shaders in Maya 2017 and not Maya 2018. I rendered out a beauty pass and an AO pass that was then all composited in After EFX. I has to apply some painterly effects to the broom to make it fit a little more with the matte painting.